TIM BAKER

I should have posted this months ago – the last of the Portraits at the Pub sessions, but I kept going for a while and then completely downed tools re: my artwork, and have only recently picked it up. I went into hibernation basically for a variety of reasons. I stopped doing both portrait sessions because I suddenly had to replace my ageing 7 year old laptop which was dying.

So what was a cost that was worrying me and I was cutting back became something I had to immediately drop to save money. Not sure many people care; like the life drawings they weren’t that popular on social media, and I felt I had got into a bit of a rut with them – like the life drawings pre-lockdown, they became a social thing, the art secondary. Which is fine apart from the fact they become expensive when you add in a drink or two!

There has been a bit of an existential crisis around my art over the last two months, I really haven’t felt the love for it, or the need like before to draw or paint. When I tried again just after Xmas I really did not enjoy the drawing or process, I don’t mean my usual ‘I started it with high hopes and excitement and it went to shit’ – I mean I hated every second of it. This is very worrying.

I need to rethink what I am doing, and maybe change practices (something a little more radical than changing media) or subjects because at the moment, trees and rivers bore the living hell out of me. Portraits were heading that way as well, hence stopping them so I don’t lose the love for them too. I still find them a challenge, but in this big “Why Bother?’ funk, it’s hard to justify it when it neither raises money nor my profile.

Anyway, I think these portraits of Madoka are good, he’s a great model and I did enjoy doing these, unlike the sessions before where I felt a bit like the drawing had taken a backseat. He’s an interesting model, and a lovely man. The reason I stopped was not this session! More events around it.

I do like the large watercolour and Lyra crayon piece, where I was painting the watercolour first and then the drawing over the top, something I need to develop further. That’s possible to do indoors, harder to do in the cold weather where watercolours take a freezing age to dry. The ink portraits have real character too – and I think this was one of the first times I used the then new Daler Rowney Graduate Mixed Media pad.

Still my biggest budget recommendation of recent times, been using it for landscapes and abstracts and it’s just as good as pads several times the price, even Clarefontaine Paint On (which I got in the Cass Art 20% off day, good pad, but I think Daler is just as good).

So where next? I don’t know, I think I need to try and see what I still have love for next year, and maybe explore other things, maybe go back to my sculpture roots (my foundation and degree I was actually in the sculpture and media/installation schools, that’s what I was focused on, and got waylaid by video, photography and more recently ink/watercolour work). Partly why I am dumping all this out there on Instagram tonight – I want to move on.

I do feel that a change either of scenery or practice is needed because this really isn’t working. I’ve focused on my podcasts, mashups and digital work recently and they have reminded me that there are other worlds out there that I am missing, that the path I am treading I need to devote myself 1000% and tbh I don’t want to do hyper-detailed watercolours of portraits, pubs, people’s pets or houses nor happy aspirational sunny landscapes for rich folks or Instagram influencers. That’s not why or what I do this for.